Hours after the deadly attack on U.S. Marines in Tennessee by a Kuwaiti-born man, GOP presidential candidate Ben Carson linked the massacre to the rise of the Islamic State in the Middle East.
“It makes you stop and think about what we’re up against with the radical jihadists, and why we have to have a real strategy for how to eliminate them,” Carson said, moments after leaving a campaign event at a private home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “We need to fight them over there. Because if we don’t fight them over there, we’re going to be fighting them over here.”
Chattanooga authorities believe that 24-year-old Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez is guilty of the attack on a military recruiting center, which left four Marines and the gunman dead, and wounded three others. Though the attacker had exhibited signs that he held fundamentalist Islamic beliefs, President Obama called the attack the work of a “lone gunman” and promised a thorough federal investigation.
Having just concluded a speech in which he excoriated the White House for not taking the fight to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, Carson is much less circumspect. “Whether he is or is not [an Islamic terrorist], we need to take this as a warning, to recognize what’s going to happen when they’re over here in force, and how it’s going to disrupt us,” he says. “And why we must be serious about eliminating a group of people who want to destroy us. And the best place to do it is where they are, not where we are.”
— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review Online.